Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2020-11-25T16:09:59.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Meet the men and women who gave up their day jobs for the good life
items: Two young British Muslims on the challenges of finding romance
items: 2 kids, 42 years old, 10,000m – Jo Pavey is Rio 2016's Olympic wonder woman
items: Charlie Dimmock returns to telly in Garden Rescue
items: Steve Backshall and Helen Glover must be Britain's fittest couple – but who's tougher?
items: The Boat Race: It’s the coxes who make the big calls
items: Who is the real Sebastian Vettel?
items: Cyclist Chris Froome on the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong and Sports Personality of the Year 2013
items: Andy Murray: I dreamt I'd won Wimbledon
items: Why Wimbledon is Andy Murray’s Groundhog Day

Meet the men and women who gave up their day jobs for the good life
type: item
date: 2017-03-07T15:15:40.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Kate Humble meets the entrepreneurs who will never again face the Monday morning dread...
encoded: Jonathan Williams 37, Owner of the Pembrokeshire Beachfood Company Jonathan Williams was staring at his computer at his nine-to-five job in sustainable architecture when he heard the call of hiraeth. “It’s a Welsh word meaning homesickness and a longing to be back home,” he says. “After years studying, travelling and beach bumming, I found my desk job in Swindon hard-going; I wasn’t inspired. Being indoors on a particularly hot summer’s day in 2010 was the moment I decided to think up a business based on things I love – family, Pembrokeshire and the beach.” Williams loved beach taverna culture (thanks to his Greek grandfather) and decided to experiment part-time selling edible seaweed. “I’d grown up foraging for seaweed, cockling and surveying shores for friends of the family, who are marine biologists. Along the Pembrokeshire coast in the 19th century, there was a traditional industry in laverbread [an edible seaweed made into a paste], which almost died out in the 1980s, but sushi had come along and helped demystify seaweed again.” In May 2011, with a diary packed with festival bookings, he left the desk job and set up the Cafe Môr beach shack selling his signature Seashore Wraps: salmon, laverbread and Welsh cheddar; bacon, laverbread and cockles; and crab and sweet chilli, as well as Welsh sushi and rolls filled with lobster and mackerel. “By the end of the summer, I had won British Street Food Awards and the opportunity to cater for the athletes in the London Olympic Village. It was a dream first year.” A few friends considered Williams mad to give up the security of a job for an income dependent on a seasonal business. “Better to try and fail, I thought. I’m not a massive worrier but, on paper, it was an awful decision,” he admits. “I gave up a good salary, a 35-hour week and paid holiday for much less income and long working hours. I used to love being a beach bum, but I’ve gone to the other extreme, working all hours every summer!” To establish a more consis…

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Two young British Muslims on the challenges of finding romance
type: item
date: 2017-03-02T10:09:05.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Channel 4's new documentary Extremely British Muslims explores a dating scene where marriage introduction events are big business
encoded: Albela (Bella) Nabi, 25, sales assistant Finding a partner has become complicated for my generation. Young Muslim women have a bigger voice now. In older generations, parents chose the partners and girls would trust their parents. We’ve been brought up in Britain in a different way. The attitude is that this is our life, we have opinions and we need to make our own decisions. At the same time, it’s a big thing in Islam to be married young. When I’m with my family I do feel pressure. I can’t lie. I am 25 and I should have settled down by now. I’m pretty sure about what I want in a partner. In my dreams, we are best friends who fall in love. He’d propose on the Eiffel Tower and we’d get married. I want romance to build naturally and be in love when I decide to spend the rest of my life with someone. I don’t want to meet someone twice, get married and the next day pop a baby. An arranged marriage? I can’t even imagine it. No way. My mum’s amazing. She wants me to marry whoever I like. ‘It has to be your choice because it’s your life and I need you to be happy,’ she says. She knows I’m picky and stubborn. She doesn’t want the responsibility of choosing my partner and then being blamed if it didn’t work out. She wouldn’t want me to say, ‘Look what’s happened! You destroyed my life.’ Most of my friends are married or have a partner they’re marrying. A few had an arranged marriage in the sense that they met a guy they’d like to marry, so the parents met. Other couples start as friends but the guy says ‘I’m serious about this’ and comes to the parents’ house to ask for her hand. That is the custom. I’d like us to be on the same page about our faith – I’d feel more comfortable discussing family issues – so not so strict that there’s no leniency, no consideration, but not so liberal that he didn’t care. I want a happy medium. When I make a decision, I will try to please my mum and my uncles and myself. I’m lucky they are so supportive. They are open minded and pro choice, but…

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2 kids, 42 years old, 10,000m – Jo Pavey is Rio 2016's Olympic wonder woman
type: item
date: 2016-08-12T07:50:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Athletics
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: The long-distance runner reveals how a hectic family life helped her get into Rio-ready shape
encoded: Jo Pavey is proud of her towering pile of ironing. Not a stack of neatly laundry on the spare bed in the family home in Devon that still requires her attention. “Some days it’s so tall it’s ridiculous. Over the past few weeks it’s reached a personal best performance in height, but I take a sense of achievement from that,” she laughs. “It means I’ve been very busy having fun with my little boy Jacob [six] and my little girl Emily [nearly three], and training. I might not have qualified for Rio if I’d concentrated on keeping it lower!” When Pavey won the 10,000m at the European Championships in 2014 – one month short of her 41st birthday, and 11 months after the birth of her second child – she was hailed as the inspirational Mum Who Runs, though her GB teammates prefer to call her Granny. Among the many accolades that followed her gold medal, she was awarded an MBE, came third behind Lewis Hamilton and Rory McIlroy in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year and was practically renamed Jo Pavey40, as her name was scarcely mentioned without an astonished reference to her age. Now she’s in Brazil with Team GB, preparing to become the first British female track athlete to compete at five consecutive Olympic Games – an incredible feat given she is now two months shy of her 43rd birthday and her event is notoriously the toughest of runs. Covering 25 laps of the track, the 10,000m demands concentration, tactical acumen, resilience in the initial jostle for position, a radar-like awareness of who in the pack is putting in a surge that requires a response, and energy enough to burst through in a last-lap sprint to the line. In the long, relentless months of training to attain peak fitness, a regular 10k athlete will clock up 100 miles a week, focus on speed in track-specific sessions and winter abroad in warm-weather, high-altitude training camps. The work that underpins a successful 10,000m runner is an awful lot of lonely miles. Not for Jo Pavey. With her husband Gavin, who i…

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Charlie Dimmock returns to telly in Garden Rescue
type: item
date: 2016-07-11T08:23:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The famous green fingers are back!
encoded: Charlie Dimmock is back on TV. There she is, mid-makeover on an exposed garden plot, tipping up a wheelbarrow full of mud, squidging down the earth around a newly planted shrub, swooshing her distinctively wayward hair off her face with the crook of her elbow, throwing back her head in hearty laughter before shooting a theatrical thumbs-up to camera. Gone are the trademark denim shorts and skimpy vest of her pin-up years in favour of jeans, an over shirt and waterproof walking boots (number one choice on lists of things she can’t live without). On screen, her presence is so familiar, so full of joshing and easy-going banter, that it seems incredible to think it’s been 11 years since her last primetime appearance on Ground Force. She still radiates the same practical personability that had her spotted as a TV natural at 26 when, as a garden-centre manager in Hampshire, she built a pond for Grass Roots, shown on Meridian (in ITV’s southern region). Off-screen, too, she arrives for an interview emanating genuine warmth and unflappability. The question is: Charlie Dimmock, where have you been all these years? “People think that if you’re suddenly not on telly, you’ve stopped working. That doesn’t happen, because we all have mortgages to pay,” she laughs. “I had been on TV a very long time [1997 to 2005], but I had always been doing other things. Ground Force ran its course. It was of its time. It was good fun, very enjoyable, and it had its run.” Dimmock’s TV CV stops abruptly in 2005 bar another year or two presenting River Walks for Meridian, but her name pops up promoting bee-keeping and allotments, gardening for children and ponds for therapy, even campaigning against “dangerous” pond plants. Her TV break was unexpected and, in going back to her pre-Ground Force life, you get a sense that she has always taken things as they come and let life unfold organically. Who would have thought a role in a touring stage show of Calendar Girls would lead to her becoming a panto…

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Steve Backshall and Helen Glover must be Britain's fittest couple – but who's tougher?
type: item
date: 2016-04-19T09:28:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: She's the world's best rower, he's TV's action man. Together, they talk training regimes, their competitive spirit and the hardest things they've ever done
encoded: Steve Backshall thrives on close encounters with dangerous predators. The intrepid naturalist is back with a new series that sees him tangle with carnivorous reptiles, swim with deadly electric eels, even handle a bullet ant whose sting delivers pain like a gunshot. “An ant that has the power to make a grown man cry... that’s very, very special,” he rhapsodises, as others might coo over a fluffy chick. When not testing his wits against the animal kingdom’s most lethal weapons, the toughest man on TV can be found honing his fitness. And boy, is he fit: his achievements include running the gruelling Marathon des Sables, the equivalent of five-and-a-half marathons, in the Sahara. As a climber, he specialises in first ascents up the world’s most daunting mountains. He finished in the top ten of the UK Tough Guy event. Oh, and he’s a martial arts black belt. Backshall is 43 on 21st April, yet his life still revolves around the words “extreme” and “challenge” – even in the domestic sphere. The woman he shares a home with, fiancée Helen Glover, 29, is the world’s top-ranked female rower. His own training regime follows his mantra of “the wilder the better” – yet her approach to fitness leaves him gasping for breath. And she doesn’t like to lose... How competitive are you with each other? STEVE Very. With the Olympics in Rio in August, time at home is for Hels to get her zip back after what must be the most intense training any athlete goes through. We sit around trying to beat each other at word puzzles or board games. Or we go in the garden and play boules or badminton, and that does get serious. HELEN I’m always the one who’s more disappointed when I lose. We both know that. Whenever Steve wins, he looks at me carefully to see how annoyed I am. What about domestic chores? HELEN I have to admit Steve does most. STEVE There’s one little word there... HELEN OK, he does all of it! I would have cereal for dinner and then run out of the door with an apple for breakfast. Steve’…

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The Boat Race: It’s the coxes who make the big calls
type: item
date: 2014-04-05T22:01:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: The cox is tactician, navigator, psychologist and cheerleader
encoded: To spectators, The Boat Race seems the purest of sporting contests – two crews busting a gut for glory. On the water, however, as microphones demonstrated last year when they picked up the obscenities emanating from Oxford cox Oskar Zorrilla, this is a head-to-head rivalry of gladiatorial ferocity. At 5.55pm on Sunday, the 160th Boat Race will see Cambridge challenge last year’s winners Oxford over four miles, 374 yards (6.8km) on a turbid incoming flood tide – the same conditions every year, hence the changing start time – on the stretch of the River Thames from Putney to Mortlake. The scoreboard stands at 81 wins for the light blues (Cambridge) to 77 for the dark blues. Television viewers are expected to peak at around 4.5 million. Large towpath crowds will create a tunnel of partisan noise. The stage is set, and one thing is certain. The spotlight will fall on two men: the coxes. Ian Middleton, aged 18, in the Cambridge boat and his opposite number Laurence Harvey, 20, weigh in at only 8st 6lb and 8st 8lb respectively, but their responsibility is heavy. They are the small men making the big calls. Each must act as tactician, navigator, psychologist and cheerleader. And the cox can make the difference between winning and losing. Middleton, the youngest man by some margin in this year’s race, is tasked with calling the shots to a Cambridge engine comprising eight power- houses whose average height is 6ft 6in, weight 14st 7lb and age 24 years. “Coming directly from school to university, it did take time to adjust from coxing guys my age to guys older than me,” he admits. “But through the winter training I’ve got used to it. It’s these long months of selection and crew formation that build up the relationship.” Unlike straight-lane 2,000m world championship lakes, the Tideway produces changing conditions over its meandering course. “Steering the line in order to put your crew in the best possible position with another crew alongside is a very different challenge,” Mi…

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Who is the real Sebastian Vettel?
type: item
date: 2014-03-30T06:01:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Formula-1
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: Formula One's greatest ever driver - or a boring obsessive who's killing the sport? Sarah Edworthy asks friends and foes...
encoded: You have to feel sorry for Sebastian Vettel. At the age of 26, the poor chap has won four consecutive Formula One world drivers’ titles, accrued a host of world records featuring the phrase “youngest ever”, and dominated a field that has included five other world champions – the likes of Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, no less. And yet Vettel’s supremacy has branded him both one of the greatest in the sport, on a par with Juan Mañuel Fangio and Alain Prost, and – deep yawn – a dull automaton who has killed all interest in it. Last year, F1’s annual global television ratings plummeted by 10 per cent to 450 million as Vettel won 13 of the 19 races, including all the last nine. No hiccups or controversies. No down- to-the-wire finale. Nothing to get viewers jumping off the sofa. When Vettel celebrated on the podium in Canada, Belgium and Singapore, the victor met with boos from the crowd. It was too much of a Seb-fest, too much an exhibition of sublime racecraft. On the eve of the new season, a long-time grand prix correspondent listed “Sebastian Vettel losing” as his number one hope for 2014. “After all,” he wrote, “it has been about eight months since anything but the German’s silly single digit has been waved.” “Tall poppy syndrome” is nothing new in sport but, in Vettel’s case, the criticism directed at the result of his domination – unexciting races and a lack of human drama – seems to have transferred to the man himself. Unfairly so. Dull? Vettel? He is far more 3D than the exultant finger-wagger of the caricature. Compared with most elite sportsmen, he is Renaissance man. This is a young man from Heppenheim, Germany, who is also fluent in French and English, who won over his Red Bull mechanics by talking to them in cockney rhyming slang. He loves Monty Python and, inspired by American Second World War bomber pilots, prefers to consider his cars as sexy personalities rather than machines, naming them accordin…

Cyclist Chris Froome on the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong and Sports Personality of the Year 2013
type: item
date: 2013-12-15T05:11:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: Cycling
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: He “absolutely smashed” the Tour de France – but what do we know about Chris Froome? Sarah Edworthy gets to know the champ…
encoded: At 9:33pm on 21 July, Chris Froome linked arms with his Sky teammates and crossed the finish line on a floodlit Champs Elysées to become the second British champion of the Tour de France and the first rider born in Africa to take home the coveted yellow jersey – a sequined maillot jaune to boot, in honour of the 100th edition of the race. It had taken Froome 83 hours, 56 minutes and 40 seconds to reach Paris after 21 days of gruelling racing over 2,115 miles. He won four individual stages, including a stunning mountaintop victory on the unforgiving Mont Ventoux, after which he required oxygen. And he “absolutely smashed” the race despite an allergy to the latex in his cycling kit that causes his skin to erupt in red welts even in training. “If he’s itching all day, he just carries on. When he sets his mind on something, nothing is going to stop him,” says his fiancée Michelle Cound. Few people know about his allergy, or that he has to manage bilharzia, a parasitic disease he caught on a childhood fishing trip in Kenya, or that his favourite hobby is spear fishing. Froome, 28, may be the fourth cyclist in six years to be shortlisted for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, but he’s the least known. Whereas Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins – who won the title in 2008, 2011 and 2012 respectively – came to the fore as Olympic track cyclists in front of high- decibel partisan velodrome crowds, Froome grew up BMX-racing on the dirt roads of Kenya’s Rift Valley and did not move to Europe as a road racer until he was in his early 20s. When Wiggins was growing up as a Mod on a Kilburn council estate, Froome was enjoying adventures such as being chased up a tree by a hippopotamus. “My upbringing gave me independence and the confidence to make my own decisions at an unusually young age,” he acknowledges, briefly back at home in Monaco after a whirlwind post-Tour period. It also makes him a curious version of an “innocent abroad”. The BBC’s SPOTY awards ce…

Andy Murray: I dreamt I'd won Wimbledon
type: item
date: 2013-06-23T22:01:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: Tennis
subject: TV
description: "There’s a lot riding on Wimbledon, but I’m better equipped to deal with the pressures and understand how I need to play matches"
encoded: Novak Djokovic is through to the next round. Roger Federer cruises on, surrendering only 11 games in two matches. Rafa Nadal faces back-to-back matches thanks to rain delays. It is day four of the French Open and, in Paris, the tennis world is abuzz with its snakes-and-ladders business of grand slam progression, upset, ranking points, prize money and glory. Where is Andy Murray? The world number two – far removed from his rivals’ locker-room banter – is walking a pair of border terriers on Ockham Common in Surrey. Having withdrawn from the French Open due to a back injury – dashing his ambition of making a fourth consecutive grand slam final – the 26-year-old Scot cuts an incongruous figure in a padded jacket, jeans and wellies, an ordinary young man spending time with girlfriend Kim Sears and their dogs, Maggie May and Rusty. In tune with the dynamic of a Murray five-set nail-biter, one minute it’s a relaxed stroll along the path, and the next he’s disappearing at speed into the heather – dodging sleepy adders and ground-nesting birds – pursuing a runaway dog. “I love walking the dogs,” he says, once we are back in his Regency-style home-cum-fitness HQ in Oxshott, sitting in a super-tidy dining room dominated by a huge portrait of a beseeching terrier’s face. (Kim is an animal artist with her own business, Brushes and Paws.) “I grew up around my grandparents’ retrievers and labradors,” he continues. “My parents both worked, so after school my brother and I would go round to Gran and Granpa’s house and they always had two dogs, a boy and a girl. It’s great that Kim and I are able to have two of them, too. Kim takes them out in the morning and when I’m back from training we go out again.” The dogs are a symbol of downtime, of a happy domestic life, and also a safe outlet through which this private, unassuming couple can project personality on their own terms. Maggie May has a twitter account [@maggiemay_hem] on which she exchanges tweets with Djokovic’s poodle, Pierr…

Why Wimbledon is Andy Murray’s Groundhog Day
type: item
date: 2013-06-17T20:30:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Edworthy
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: Tennis
subject: TV
description: Every year Andy faces the question ‘Could this be your year’, but he says it’s the home crowd that’ll help him achieve his goal
encoded: Wimbledon for Andy Murray is Groundhog Day. Every year he finds himself repeating the same answer again and again to the same question: could this be your year? How does he deal with that? “I deal with it as best I can, knowing that I’ve played some of my best tennis at Wimbledon over the course of my career,” he says. “It’s the build-up that’s difficult. People follow me everywhere and there are more strains on my time. Once the tournament starts, it’s great. I try to manage my energy well and fit in the extra commitments around training, practice and rest," Murray says in an interview in this week's Radio Times magazine. What seems most unbelievable to Murray is that the positive momentum that began with the Olympic gold medal, continued with his first grand slam title at the US Open, and took him to another final against Djokovic at the Australian Open, has been stalled by injury. As he concedes, expectation has never been higher. He will tread the grass of SW19 not just as the British number one, but as the world number two, Olympic and US Open champion. Surely this could be the year that Murray becomes the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936? The night before Murray stepped back onto a practice court after Wimbledon 2012 he dreamt he was holding the men’s singles trophy above his head in victory. “Three or four days afterwards, I woke up thinking I’d won Wimbledon. When I realised I hadn’t, that set me back again, but once I was back on the practice court I started to feel better. Something had changed. Those two weeks before the Olympics were the best I’ve ever played in practice. That was the first time that I responded really well after a painful loss. “I was struggling after I’d lost at Wimbledon. It was one of the toughest matches for me to lose,” he says. Immediately after the trophy ceremony, he spoke with Lendl in the locker room. “Not about the match, more about the way I’d handled the situation and the pressure. He was really h…

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